Every great business starts with the seed of a great idea, and as an aspiring entrepreneur, with a desire to sell fashion, it’s so easy to be seduced by the online world.

Online shopping makes a trip to the local mall practically unnecessary, as every major designer label and some not-so-designer labels have set up shop online and have become some of the most powerful eCommerce sites on the market today. For you, however, until your consumership grows, you’re just a little fish in a sea of online shops, and if you want to succeed and turn some serious profit, here are five mistakes that you need to avoid making:

1)  Skipping Over Market Research

If you think that you can just upload a website template, throw some items on it and start selling, you’ve lost your marbles! If you don’t know who you’re selling to, what you are selling, or why your are selling it, you are going to find yourself floundering around, wasting a boatload of cash on advertising because you didn’t have the foresight to determine who your target market is.

2)  Incorrectly Gauging Market Demand

If the market is currently flooded with plain silk chiffon maxi dresses, then it’s probably a good idea if you don’t stock chiffon maxi dresses, no matter how fashionable you think they are. Why would you want to stock something that everyone else sells? You’ll have a heck of a time trying to sell it off, and chances are, you won’t be able to sell it cheaper than your competition, so you’ve just eaten into your profits because you’re sitting on inventory that won’t move. Determine what people are looking for, not just what’s available to them.

3)  Not Taking Shipping Costs into Consideration

Unless you are running your biz from the back room of some factory in China, you have two main things to worry about; Where are you getting your product from, and how is it getting to your customer. Remember, if you go global, you have to be prepared to take international credit cards which can open you up to all sorts of headaches. Until you have the capital to go world wide, keep it national.

4)  Undercut Your Competition

This may seem like a really good idea, and it may artificially drive more attention to your business at first, but the image that you are relaying to your customer is that you don’t actually see value in your own product, and you’re simply there to make a quick buck if you can. If you don’t see the value in your own product, why should they?

5)  Use a Complicated User Interface

So many start up businesses focus so heavily on their website, that they lose sight of what it is they are trying to achieve. When you’re trying to sell fashion, you don’t require a lot of bells and whistles on a website. Clean, crisp, fresh and innovative, that is what you need in a website. You need a design that showcases your products beautifully, allows for easy navigation, and most importantly, makes the buying process as easy as breathing.